Film Subtitles Research Articles

Дискурсивный маркер you know и его функциональный перевод на русский язык при субтитровании и дубляже художественных фильмов

Дискурсивный маркер you know и его функциональный перевод на русский язык при субтитровании и дубляже художественных фильмов

Film Subtitles as a Successful Vocabulary Learning Tool

Films are a valuable source of authentic language material, but what makes them superior to other types of authentic materials is the existence of a full storyline which leads to the increased engagement of the viewer. Despite the fact that teachers intuitively know this particular activity which may enhance language learning there is little research that has sought to thoroughly examine its potential impact on vocabulary acquisition and retention. While most studies conclude that the type of subtitling is an important factor influencing vocabulary learning; defining which particular type of subtitling is most effective seems difficult to determine and results in this area are somewhat inconclusive. Further research is, therefore, necessary to determine which type of subtitling would lead to optimum results in vocabulary acquisition and retention.

An Analysis of Subtitle Translation of Hello, Mr. Billionaire from the Perspective of Skopos Theory

As a significant medium of cross-culture communication, film subtitle translation should be attached more importance to for the sake of better implementing Chinese Culture Going Global Strategy. Appropriate subtitle translation can accurately convey cultural connotations and facilitate cross-cultural communication, while inappropriate subtitle translation may cause flavor loss or even lead to serious misunderstandings. Therefore, subtitle translation is of great importance. In order to improve subtitle translation in Chinese comedy and boost cultural communication in the world, this article makes an analysis of subtitle translation of Hello, Mr. Billionaire, a typical Chinese comedy gaining popularity and praise, from the perspective of skopos theory and provides suggestions for subtitle translation improvements.

Rendering ECR in Subtitles: A Case Study of the Traditional Chinese Martial Arts Films

The traditional Chinese martial arts film is a special type of mass media which reflects the Chinese culture, and it comes into vogue due to the popularity of martial arts fiction. For foreign audiences, watching the traditional Chinese martial arts film, they rely heavily on subtitles to understand the plot and the specific Chinese culture. However, it is not easy to produce readable subtitles. Jan Pedersen, defines the specific cultural terms as “Extralinguistic Cultural References (ECR)”, and puts forward a systematic theory. In this paper, the theory of Pedersen is been used to render ECRs in subtitles of the traditional Chinese martial arts films. The purpose of this paper is to attract people’s attention to the studies of translation of ECRs of subtitles, and to contribute a small effort to the “going out” initiative of Chinese culture.

The Subtitle Translation of Wolf Warriors From the Perspective of Multimodal Discourse Analysis

With the rapid advancement of multimedia technology, multimodal discourse analysis has gradually become one of the linguistic research hotspots and it integrates the modalities of other fields such as images, sounds, colors and so on to jointly present the complete meaning of the work. The film subtitles are different from traditional paper texts, and their translation is not only a simple text conversion, but also involves complex factors of the transformation of source language and target language culture. From the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis, this paper studies the subtitle translation of Wolf Warriors by using Professor Zhang Delu’s multimodal theory as a framework from cultural level, context level, content level and expression level to analyze how this theory affects the subtitle translation of the film Wolf Warriors and provides valuable suggestions for other film subtitle translation.

The Americanization of Film Subtitles: A Sociocultural Linguistic Perspective to Subtitling Translation in the Arab World

One inevitable technique used by translators is to draw the author’s modes of thinking towards that of the reader as close as possible without paying much attention to the various aspects of meaning associated. This domestication technique has been criticized by Venuti (1995) for its denial of the visible role of the translator in his/her translated text. As a substitute, a translator might foreignize the reader’s modes of thinking and introduce him to that of the author. In parallel, a film subtitler is doomed to choose one of these preferences either to satisfy the target language audiences linguistically and culturally, or to impose on them the source language foreign structures and modes of thinking. The translator’s preference between these two techniques is not as clear cut as Venuti suggests. Factors such as the language distance between the SL and the TL, the translated text’s subject matter, the language dominancy, and the translator’s level of acquaintance with the various cultural facets of both the TL and the SL should also be taken into consideration in such preference. This paper is an attempt to investigate the subtitling translation of the American films in the Arab world in terms of Venuti's dichotomy of domestication and foreignization. It is based on a case study which examined the Arabic subtitle of two American films; “The Aviator” and “The Departed”, and the English subtitle of the Egyptian Arabic film “Hassan wa Murkis”.

The Effects of Film Subtitles on English Listening Comprehension and Vocabulary

An attempt of this study was to find out which type of subtitles is likely to be more effective in developing EFL tenth-grade students’ listening comprehension and vocabulary of a feature film: bimodal subtitling (English subtitles with English dialogues), standard subtitling (Thai subtitles with English dialogues), and English dialogues without subtitles. The data of this study was elicited from three groups of students in tenth-grade, 21 students per group, with similar English learning achievement level. Students in each group were assigned to watch an English dialogue movie with assigned subtitles, one type of subtitles per one group. They were tested on listening comprehension, content and vocabulary after they finished watching the movie. After all the students had finished taking the test, four persons from each group were randomly selected to be interviewed. The findings showed that Thai subtitles affect tenth-grade students’ listening comprehension more than English subtitles and not having any subtitles at all. The average scores for content and vocabulary showed that Thai subtitles affect students’ listening comprehension of content and vocabulary more than English subtitles and having no subtitles whatsoever.

Introduction: The translation and dissemination of Chinese cinemas

This introduction provides a brief historical overview of the translation of Chinese cinemas and explores how film translation facilitates the dissemination of Chinese films. It also gives a description of the purpose, structure, and the methodologies of the contributing articles in this special issue. Offering fresh visions and innovative studies on various important issues, including mistranslation, the dubbing of Hong Kong kung fu films, the dubbing of foreign films in China, the subtitling of Chinese dialect films, the subtitling of independent Chinese documentaries, and a vivid personal account of the translation and distribution of Chinese cinemas in France, this special issue aims to generate international dialogue by presenting diverse approaches to the translation and dissemination of Chinese cinemas.

중한 영상 자막 번역 : 중국 예능 『偶像來了』의 예능용어를 중심으로

This paper first discusses the technical aspects of the subtitle translation program and the contents of the video subtitle translation. Then, on the basis of the translation theory of German telegraphic translation scholars Hans Vermeer and Katherina, he translated subtitles for the Chinese entertainer program “偶像來了”, it is divided into four translation methods: abbreviation, clarification, comment, and naturalization. The results of translation and analysis of subtitles are as follows.BR First, although the translation method is classified into four methods of abbreviation, clarification, comment, and naturalization, there are many cases where translation methods such as abbreviation and naturalization are mixed so that it is not easy to distinguish clearly in actual translation.BR Second, due to the characteristics of entertainment programs, Internet terms that are popular in China are widely used. In translating them, translators should investigate their meaning carefully and search for proper Korean translation.BR Third, we have to study the genre of video material that should be subtitle translated. The data analyzed in this paper is Chinese entertainment program. Therefore, by watching the Korean entertainment program before translating it, it is possible to provide the subtitle translation which can be accepted by the Korean audience naturally by learning the form and the expression of the subtitle.BR Vermeer said that the purpose of the translation was to determine the translation method. In every film subtitle translation, the purpose of the translation will be determined according to the genre of the video and the translation method will be determined accordingly. Therefore, the translator should try hard so that it becomes the most ‘suitable’ translation to object audience, not unconditional ‘equivalent’ translation.

Audiovisual Translation:A Critical Review on Sino-western Perspectives of Film Subtitle Translation

The paper argues the development of audiovisual translation (mainly focuses on the strand of film subtitle translation) in the West and China. Firstly, the paper discusses film translation from the perspective of the West and critically reviews the achievements produced by western researchers. Secondly, the paper analyzes film translation from Chinese perspective and outlines its change and development in Mainland China. Thirdly, some major issues exited in film translation such as cultural problems, technical issues and translation strategies are analyzed. And in the fourth part, the paper takes a unique Chinese film genre, Chinese martial arts/wuxia film (中國武俠電影), as a specific case to analyze and then further discuss the studies of film translation in the context of Chinese culture. The potential underexplored areas of translating Chinese martial arts film are also identified. Lastly, the paper argues the audiovisual translation from an inter-/multi-disciplinary angle involving film study, social-cultural study, multimodal analysis and relevant linguistic approaches and then points out the potential future trends in audiovisual translation studies. In short, there are three significances in the research. The first one is making a comparative analysis to development path of film translation between Western side and China’s side. The second is arguing the translation of Chinese wuxia film from a diachronic perspective and identifying existed research gaps. The last is pointing out the potential research trends based on the latest research progress.

The Effects of Film Subtitles on Students' Language Awareness

The Effects of Film Subtitles on Students' Language Awareness

Online film subtitles as a corpus: ann-gram approach

In this paper, I investigate online film subtitles from a quantitative perspective, treating them as a separate register of communication. Subtitles from films in English and other languages translated into English are compared with registers of spoken and written communication represented by large corpora of British and American English. A series of quantitative analyses based of n-gram frequencies demonstrate that subtitles are not fundamentally different from other registers of English and that they represent a close approximation of British and American informal conversations. However, I show that the subtitles are different from the conversations with regard to several functional characteristics, which are typical of the language of scripted dialogues in films and TV series in general. Namely, the language of subtitles is more emotional and dynamic, but less spontaneous, vague and narrative than that of normally occurring conversations. The paper also compares subtitles in original English and subtitles translated from other languages and detects variation that can be explained by differences in communicative styles.

Large-Scale Patterns of Entertainment Gratifications in Linguistic Content of U.S. Films

We count words in film subtitle files in an attempt to reveal morally relevant patterns of linguistic content. We argue that function words (e.g., pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions) should be positively associated with thought-provoking narrative forms. To test this hypothesis, we associate function words to aggregate measures of film viewership and appraisals. Results suggest that function words are negatively associated with measures of viewership but positively associated with appraisals. As such, our finding is consistent with the idea that function words are more likely to occur in narrative forms that audiences value more than they actually consume. We relate this finding to past research, which has shown the same pattern for hedonic versus meaningful entertainment gratifications. Discussion centers on implications for recent theorizing in this area.

The Challenge of Culture-Specific Phrases in English-Arabic Subtitling

This article explores the main challenges that translators face in the subtitling of English language films into Arabic and addresses key issues by examining the common features hindering audio-visual translation and highlighting particular cultural limitations intrinsic to translation for Arabic speaking audiences, assuming that particular fundamentals of translation theory can help overcome cultural challenges. A quantitative approach is adopted in the study. The quantitative data were collected through a questionnaire involving students at the Translation Department of Tripoli University to gauge their views about the current quality of English into Arabic subtitles. The findings of this study have practical contributions in enhancing the quality of subtitling. They also benefit academic research through expanding the literature in the field of subtitling which in turn will benefit future researchers.

A Multivariate Study of T/V Forms in European Languages Based on a Parallel Corpus of Film Subtitles

The present study investigates the cross-linguistic differences in the use of so-called T/V forms (e.g. French tu and vous, German du and Sie, Russian ty and vy) in ten European languages from different language families and genera. These constraints represent an elusive object of investigation because they depend on a large number of subtle contextual features and social distinctions, which should be cross-linguistically matched. Film subtitles in different languages offer a convenient solution because the situations of communication between film characters can serve as comparative concepts. I selected more than two hundred contexts that contain the pronouns you and yourself in the original English versions, which are then coded for fifteen contextual variables that describe the Speaker and the Hearer, their relationships and different situational properties. The creators of subtitles in the other languages have to choose between T and V when translating from English, where the T/V distinction is not expressed grammatically. On the basis of these situations translated in ten languages, I perform multivariate analyses using the method of conditional inference trees in order to identify the most relevant contextual variables that constrain the T/V variation in each language.

The Untranslatability in Chinese-English Translation of Film Subtitles under the Perspective of Cultural Limitation—A Case Study of Empresses in the Palace

The Untranslatability in Chinese-English Translation of Film Subtitles under the Perspective of Cultural Limitation—A Case Study of Empresses in the Palace

GRAMMATICAL COMPRESSION IN FILM TRANSLATION

Nowadays translators employ various translation strategies in order to produce an adequate translation and further establish international communication. This paper deals with one translation strategy called compression which involves leaving out the target text elements present in the source text to retain the content of the words rather than preserve the structural adequacy of the text format. The degree of compression is constantly increasing in contemporary translations, due to an intensive lifestyle, the necessity to convey informational content as quickly as possible arises. Compression is widely employed in subtitling because of both the requirement to provide a very short target text by employing a restricted number of symbols allowed per one subtitle, and the necessity to express only the main idea of the utterances. Taking linguistic aspects into account, the translation strategy comprises of either grammatical or lexical ways to shorten the text without destroying its meaning. This paper presents the grammatical means of compression observed in film subtitling by shifting the primary focus on grammatical alternations found in different film genres.

Valence, arousal, familiarity, concreteness, and imageability ratings for 292 two-character Chinese nouns in Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong.

Words are frequently used as stimuli in cognitive psychology experiments, for example, in recognition memory studies. In these experiments, it is often desirable to control for the words’ psycholinguistic properties because differences in such properties across experimental conditions might introduce undesirable confounds. In order to avoid confounds, studies typically check to see if various affective and lexico-semantic properties are matched across experimental conditions, and so databases that contain values for these properties are needed. While word ratings for these variables exist in English and other European languages, ratings for Chinese words are not comprehensive. In particular, while ratings for single characters exist, ratings for two-character words—which often have different meanings than their constituent characters, are scarce. In this study, ratings for 292 two-character Chinese nouns were obtained from Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong. Affective variables, including valence and arousal, and lexico-semantic variables, including familiarity, concreteness, and imageability, were rated in the study. The words were selected from a film subtitle database containing word frequency information that could be extracted and listed alongside the resulting ratings. Overall, the subjective ratings showed good reliability across all rated dimensions, as well as good reliability within and between the different groups of participants who each rated a subset of the words. Moreover, several well-established relationships between the variables found consistently in other languages were also observed in this study, demonstrating that the ratings are valid. The resulting word database can be used in studies where control for the above psycholinguistic variables is critical to the research design.

Communicative Rituals and Audiovisual Translation – Representation of Otherness in Film Subtitles

In a contrastive study of front door rituals between friends in Australia and France (Béal and Traverso 2010), the interactional practices observed in the corpus collected are shown to exhibit distinctive verbal and non-verbal features, despite similarities. The recurrence of these features is interpreted as evidence of a link between conversational style and underlying cultural values. Like contrastive work in cross-cultural pragmatics more generally, this conclusion raises questions of representation from an audiovisual and audiovisual translation perspective: how are standard conversational routines depicted in film dialogues and in their translation in subtitling or dubbing? What are the implications of these textual representations for audiences? These questions serve as platform for the case study in this article, of greetings and other communicative rituals in a dataset of two French and one Spanish contemporary films and their subtitles in English. They are addressed from an interactional cross-cultural pragmatics perspective and draw on Fowler’s Theory of Mode (1991, 2000) to assess subtitles’ potential to mean cross-culturally as text.

Exploring The Transfer Of Cultural Specificity In Film Subtitling :, The Case Study Of University Teachers Of European Universities

The basic aim of the present paper is to explore the way cultural specificity is rendered in film subtitling and how it is approached at the academic level. To this end, a questionnaire was administered online to ten teachers of subtitling from different European universities in order to gather direct information about the general issues surrounding this topic and attain a deeper perception of the methodologies followed by professionals in the field together with their ensuing problems and limitations.